Driving from Kenya's bustling capital, Nairobi, north-east to the world's biggest refugee camp at Dadaab near the Somali border takes more than eight hours.

The total travel time depends on Nairobi's traffic jams and, later, the carved ruts of the seemingly endless sandy track that stretches through flat, dry, ochre-coloured country - not unlike parts of the Australian outback.

For reporter Ben Knight and cameraman Geoffrey Lye of the ABC's Middle East bureau, who have spent much of the year bouncing around Egypt and Libya, the journey to Dadaab was yet another episode of heat, dust and human tragedy.

Driven by need, more Somalis will make the long trek, on average 21 to 25 days, to Dadaab.

For me, it revived memories of my first contact with refugees 30 years ago in eastern Sudan. It was hard to believe, back then, that the world knew Eritrean refugees were starving and did little to relieve their suffering.

Dadaab is a sprawling settlement of mud and brush huts and dazzling white UNHCR tents - a dramatic contrast to long-ago Sudan.

The business of saving lives is taken very seriously here. You can see it in the eyes of Dr Humphrey Musyoka at the baby stabilisation centre run by the International Rescue Committee at Hagadera camp. And it is apparent in the faces of the overburdened staff of Medecins Sans Frontieres at the reception centre clinic where infants are measured and weighed and inoculated amid bouts of high-pitched screaming.

The urgency to save lives is embodied in the decisive way that Regina Muchai, of the Lutheran World Federation, patrols the lines of refugees outside the Dagahaley camp; she's looking for those who haven't yet been made it to first base - being given a brightly coloured wristband that entitles them to emergency food supplies meant to last three weeks.

And credit must go to those who deserve it: mainly the young, dedicated Kenyans who are labouring unrelieved for months at a time for an alphabet soup of international aid agencies. They are the foot soldiers providing relief in this humanitarian crisis.

Dadaab is not a disaster because the human capital here is strong and the institutions are deeply rooted. The first Somali refugees came streaming across the border in 1991 when the war - which has made the south of the country largely ungovernable over the past two decades - first broke out.

Many of those Somalis never returned. They've dug in here, building elaborate mud brick housing complexes and establishing businesses running everything from camels, donkeys and goats to fast-food stalls and shops for tailoring men and women's clothing.

Now those camps are groaning at the seams - holding four times the number for which they were planned, and new camps are desperately needed.

A tented camp, Ifo 3, has been created in just a matter of weeks.

Another camp, Ifo 2, is more substantial - rows and rows of mud brick cottages with galvanised iron roofs. But the doors of Ifo 2 are firmly padlocked.

Although international aid agencies have spent a reported $20 million readying the camp - and the UNHCR insists the camp is open - the Kenyan government has thus far refused to let refugees move in, notwithstanding a prime ministerial directive.

Locking up Ifo 2 means Somali refugees are spending longer in the so-called "outskirts camps", living in primitive humpies and awaiting the opportunity to come into the official camps, which have the luxuries of water and toilets, medical services and schools.

International pressure will probably resolve the problem before too long but not, the Kenyan government hopes, before it has made its point. Kenya has millions of its own people living in drought-stricken country and no desire to host the world's largest refugee camp in perpetuity.

Therefore, the US and Europe need to show significantly more intent in trying to engineer solutions: an escalation in short-term aid, such that Somalis can be fed in their own country as well as the creation of a stable (and legitimate) government that can rein in the various militias that group under the broad umbrella of Al Shabaab.

None of this will happen quickly. In the next month the declaration of famine in Somalia - a definition which indicates that 30 per cent of the population is regarded as malnourished - will probably be extended from the present five provinces to all of southern Somalia.

Driven by need, more Somalis will make the long trek, on average 21 to 25 days, to Dadaab.

When they finally arrive, often with heartbreaking stories of death and tragedy en route, they'll queue, sometimes for days, to be admitted at a reception centre. They'll queue again, for the precious wristband entitling them to emergency rations. Then they'll struggle with their meagre supplies back to the outskirts.

There they'll sit for another three or four weeks, or perhaps by then even longer, awaiting the formal process of registration as a refugee.

At every stage there are obstacles and setbacks, but even just a few days with Somalis provides an eloquent lesson in resilience and determination to survive.

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